What I Read This Week - 2.25.24
Weekly finds from across the internet.
Hi everyone!
We are deep into the weeds of Spring Training out here in Surprise, Arizona. After a long wait (but our shortest one in franchise history…. 💍), baseball is back!
And so too is What I Read This Week for version #3. This week, some finds from sports, personal development, the future, and some mental models to help make us all better decision makers.
Enjoy!
- CG
Sports/High Performance
Messi, Inc. - The Generalist (~12 min)
A fascinating and increasingly relevant read on Messi’s transcendence beyond sport. The world’s greatest footballer serves as an example for how to leverage established IP from athletic excellence to expand one’s scope, as he moves into areas such as media and venture capital.
Messi is but another in a long list of athletes turned investors - Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Tom Brady, Serena William, and many more. More and more frequently, athletes are becoming personal companies. The digital era has opened up the path for athletes to monetize and expand their influence in never before seen ways, allowing people everywhere a proximity to greatness that has never before existed.
Personal Growth/Development
You Don’t Need More How-To Advice - You Need a Beautiful and Painful Reckoning - Tim Ferris (~12 min)
In this piece, Tim bluntly describes why most of us fall short of lifestyle changes we set for ourselves: we lack a powerful and profound moment that spurs us to action. Instead, we view goals as nice-to-haves rather than must-haves, inevitably allowing ourselves to fall off track before we make sustained progress.
As a remedy, he shares the story of his friend Chad Fowler (GP & CTO at BlueYard Capital) who lost 70+ pounds in less than 12 months. When he asked him how, Chad answer was simple: he had a experienced a perspective change in Tokyo, his ‘Harajuku Moment’. It was a beautiful and painful reckoning that set the stage for the progress to come.
New Technologies (Crypto, AI, etc.)
Nvidia ‘Chat with RTX (~1 min)
A quick watch of a product release from Nvidia called ‘Chat with RTX’, an AI chatbot that runs locally on your personal CPU. This caught my eye as I’ve become fascinated with the idea of personal chatbots and what they can do to help us augment our individual lives. Imagine all of your notes and highlights, indexed and queryable via conversation like your own personal JARVIS. A true second brain. AI has the power to help us unlock parts of our brains that we rarely know exist, and we are getting closer to this reality each day.
We’re the Industry of the Future - Its Time to Act Like It - Evan Armstrong (~7 min)
A great thought piece from Evan on how the autonomous driving industry serves as a case study for the challenges innovative companies face in today’s world. Pessimism is inherently easier than optimism, and as a result Tech has become one of the least trusted industries in America - even though it possesses the greatest power to drive us forward into the future.
As a result, many startups are having to spend time justifying why they won’t make the world worse rather than how they will make it better. This is exactly backwards, to both Evan and myself. As Evan argues, the path forward will require the ability to sell the future we see - as well as our capabilities of delivering on it.
Running a Business, Writing a Book, and Getting a Ph.D. - With ChatGPT - Dan Shipper (~5 min)
A great interview by Dan from Every, diving into the secrets underlying - Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s productivity. A giant in the field of productivity and founder of Ness Labs, Anne-Laure shares how she utilizes ChatGPT to augment her skills. From delegating menial tasks to unearthing hidden information on the internet and fine-tunning a message, this is a great read/listen on how AI can be leveraged to improve our productive output.
Mental Models/Frameworks
Reversible and Irreversible Decisions - Farnam Street (~6 min)
A discussion of Jeff Bezos’s ‘One or Two-Way Door’ framework, this article from Shane at Farnam Street dives into the nuances of speed’s role in decision making. The gist: make reversible decisions (two-way doors) quickly, and irreversible decisions (one-way doors) slowly.
Navalisms - David Senra (~3 min)
I am big admirer of Naval Ravikant’s work and insights, so much so that I consider The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson as one of the most foundational books I have read. Here, David from Founder’s Podcast shares some of Naval’s most powerful ideas in a quick thread. A couple of my favorites:
“Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.”
“Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.”
“Specific knowledge is found by pursuing your genuine curiosity and passion rather than whatever is hot right now. Building specific knowledge will feel like play to you but will look like work to others.”